Thinking in a different language affects how you make decisions

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Back in 2002, psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the economics Nobel Prize for showing that human beings don't have a really good intuitive grasp of risk. Basically, the decisions we make when faced with a risky proposition depend more on how the question is framed than on what the actual outcome might be.

The classic example is to tell a subject that there's going to be a disaster. Out of 600 people, she has a chance of saving 200 if she takes x risk. If she doesn't take the risk, everybody dies. Most people will take the risk in that scenario, but if you present the same situation and frame it differently—"If you take this risk, 400 people will die"—the decisions suddenly flip in the other direction. Nothing has changed about the outcome. But everything has changed in terms of how people feel about the decision they have to make. This is the kind of thing that matters a lot to economics because it helps to explain why economic behavior in the real world isn't always as rational and self-interested as it is in theory.

There's a new study out in the journal Psychological Science that might add another layer of complexity to Kahneman's research. If you're thinking and talking in your native language, you're likely to respond to a risky situation pretty much exactly as in the classic example. But, these researchers found that if you're thinking and talking about the situation in a second language, things change. At Wired, Brandon Keim explains:

The first experiment involved 121 American students who learned Japanese as a second language. Some were presented in English with a hypothetical choice: To fight a disease that would kill 600,000 people, doctors could either develop a medicine that saved 200,000 lives, or a medicine with a 33.3 percent chance of saving 600,000 lives and a 66.6 percent chance of saving no lives at all.

Nearly 80 percent of the students chose the safe option. When the problem was framed in terms of losing rather than saving lives, the safe-option number dropped to 47 percent. When considering the same situation in Japanese, however, the safe-option number hovered around 40 percent, regardless of how choices were framed. The role of instinct appeared reduced.

That's interesting. The researchers tried this basic thing with several different groups of people—mostly native English speakers—and used several different risk scenarios, some involving loss of life, others involving loss of a job, and others involving decisions about betting money on a coin toss. They saw the same results in all the tests: People thinking in their second language weren't as swayed by the emotional impact of framing devices.

One study doesn't prove this is universally true. Even if it is true, nobody knows yet exactly why. But Keim says that the researchers think the difference lies in emotional distance. If you have to pause and really put some brain power into thinking about grammar and vocabulary, you can't just jump straight into the knee-jerk reaction.

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My guess would be that if the risk is presented in a language you know fluently, one that you grow up with, you’ll be able to process on a more emotional level and be susceptible to the phrasing.

It’s probably not the best analogy, but consider how it is to read: if you read fluidly, you do not necessarily perceive words on a page but the actual ideas or visuals they represent (you don’t even read each letter of a word but the amalgamation of letters, as shown by a number of studies where people can raed snetenses of smcralbed wrods.)

But with poor or mediocre reading skills, it can be difficult to follow ideas, form clear visuals in your mind, or connect on an emotional level to the story. Similarly, someone who must filter ideas through translation will lose that connection to emotion.

I just started reading Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It goes over the different systems that make decisions in our brain – I would predict ANY thing that forces you to make a slower decision would tend towards producing more rational decisions. Here the mechanism would be reduced fluency forcing you to think more about the terms. I would love to see the responses broken out by familiarity and fluency in the second language – my hypothesis would be that increased fluency would lead to more of the instinctual choice.

i”ve often wondered if simply thinking in a given language led your thoughts in a particular general set of pathways- in other words, just like certain kinds of music seem easier to sing in spanish are there certain kinds of thoughts easier to think in spanish?

Out of 600 people, she has a chance of saving 200 if she takes x risk. If she doesn’t take the risk, everybody dies. Most people will take the risk in that scenario, but if you present the same situation and frame it differently—”If you take this risk, 400 people will die”—the decisions suddenly flip in the other direction. Nothing has changed about the outcome.

Is this actually an accurate description of the scenario? The way you describe it, there is no possible way that not taking the risk could save more people than taking it–if you don’t take it all 600 are guaranteed to die, if you do take it 400 are guaranteed to die but 200 have a chance of surviving. I have a hard time believing that with this scenario, people would be so stupid as to be scared off by the description “if you take this risk, 400 people will die” since surely it would occur to them that if they don’t take the risk, 600 will die. Is there a link that discusses this example?

The scenario described in the Wired article is actually quite different, since there, depending on the outcome of your risky bet, more people could end up dying than if you hadn’t taken the risk. So in that case it would make more sense to me that depending on the way it’s framed verbally (including what language it’s framed in), people might make different choices.

If you’re thinking and talking in your native language, you’re likely to respond to a risky situation pretty much exactly as in the classic example. But, these researchers found that if you’re thinking and talking about the situation in a second language, things change.

I’d have to read the study in more detail, but from the summary what it actually says is “If you’re thinking and talking in your native language AND YOUR NATIVE LANGUAGE IS ENGLISH, you’re likely to respond to a risky situation pretty much exactly as in the classic example, whereas if you’re thinking and talking about the situation in a second language AND THAT LANGUAGE IS JAPANESE, things change.” I don’t see any indication that it generalizes.

I think GTMoogle is on the right track and it’s the complexity of speaking in a foreign language that causes people to think more analytically. BUT that’s not necessarily so.

I think Japanese is a more “mathematical” language than English is — what happens when you try the study in reverse, with native Japanese speakers? Could be the issue isn’t native versus foreign, it’s English versus Japanese.

Or, try substituting other languages. What happens if a native English speaker considers the question in Russian, German, etc.? Or vice-versa?

So, first thing, if you’d read the article, you’d notice that they did do it in mutiple languages. One was Americans who learned Japanese, another was Korean who learned English and a third was Americans who spoke Spanish as a second language.

Secondly… Japanese is more “mathematical”? I speak the language reasonably well (enough for daily life at least), and I have no idea what that even means…

Yebbit, it still appears to have been mostly US students. I’d have liked to see a more international population of experimental animals. One reason learning a foreign language helped me as an American kid think straighter is it stripped out the repetitive slang and unrelated but entertaining tv references that passed for conversation… A second reason is probably that we were learning the new language in a university environment that was slightly more rational than the environment in which we learned our Muttersprache. Which brings me to the third reason: the source of my new language, Germany, and other countries may be just slightly more rational than the USA, especially university Germany vs. Appalachian small towns. Again, I’d have liked to see a broader range of test subjects in this very interesting study.

I’m curious whether the same results occur when questions of risk are posed in English to native speakers of Japanese that are also fluent in English.
I expect for most that the issue is one thinks more lazily when using their native language than a second language. However, if it’s proved that certain languages are better for discussing certain issues then it would open up some interesting new lines of language research. Topic-based sub-dialects: so weird and cool and possibly useful.

How can researchers be sure that participants are really using their first or their second language while making their decisions? Mmm… They can’t. They can perhaps only “push” a language modality (i.e. speaking in language A before the test for a while, and assuming that will be the (only?) active language during tests. So, I am now going to read the article. :-) , but if I get lazy, anyone can answer this?

The “safe” option would be to take the sure thing to save 1/3 of the people rather than risking not curing anyone. Then again, I always seem to look at this kind of question from the wrong side, probably because my first language is one of those weird private twin languages, without the benefit of actually having a twin, and English is a distant second.

John le Carré wrote several times that to learn another language is to grow another soul. Anyone know the source of this quote? I can’t google it.
As for the meaning, I think you could substitute “perspective” for soul.

On the internet it’s often given as “learn a new language and get a new soul”, and said to be a “Czech proverb”, but attributions on random internet sites are never trustworthy. Whenever looking for quotes I always like to do an advanced google books search, sometimes with the date range restricted to find only the oldest results…Apparently the saying predates le Carré, for example I found this book from 1826 which says on p. 151, “It was justly said by the Emperor Charles the Fifth, that to learn a new language was to acquire a new soul.”